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Orca
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Post by Orca »

@ Prak

The fun bit would be putting in the charging infrastructure and the new power plants. I guess you could just build a lot of oil fired plants as the minimal infrastructure change but that seems unlikely to achieve the goals that would make you want to switch to electric vehicles.

Wind power would be the next easiest to build in large scale - but you'll need a proper nationwide electric grid first. I understand the US has a bunch of badly interlinked regional grids instead at present.

Nuclear could more easily be built close to where the power's used. What's the state of the antinuclear or NIMBY types in the US at the mo?
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Post by erik »

Prak wrote:I looked at some quick back of the envelope numbers last night and figured that a $20k voucher for every registered vehicle in the US would amount to something like $5.1 billion, which is about 1% of the 2016 DoD budget.
I think you need to check your envelope.

Or are you suggesting there are only 255,000 registered vehicles in the US?

A quick googling stated there were 260 million registered passenger vehicles in the US as of 2014. If there were $20,000 vouchers for each, then that would be $5.2 Trillion.

So you were off a few decimal places.
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Post by Prak »

Ah. Ok, my "envelope" (really in my head) math was wrong.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

At the moment, the US is experiencing an energy boom due to cheap natural gas from fracking. That is making coal too expensive, so environmentalism isn't the enemy of coal country the way they thought.

Switching to electricity isn't as straightforward as you might think. Obviously, electrical energy has to come from somewhere. Usually, that somewhere is burning fossil fuels. It's probably more efficient to burn the fossil fuels directly in the car than in a power station, but that certainly might not be true. Of course, if your electrical generation is not based on fossil fuel, you can get a lot more benefit for your environment.

I personally like hydrogen as a fuel source, but just like electricity, it takes energy to make it. One major advantage, though, is that you can store large amounts relatively easily. Effectively, you can make hydrogen when you have surplus energy and use it whenever you need it. Battery storage has come a long way, but it's not as efficient as it really ought to be if we're going to make a wholesale switch to stored electrical energy.

You'll find that people talk about using energy to pump water uphill so they can release it when they need energy. Our current electrical grid is entirely 'on demand'. All the energy people are using RIGHT NOW is being generated RIGHT NOW. If there is no sun and no wind, that energy is being made from fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Finding ways to store energy effectively is the real major hurdle for renewables.
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Post by Chamomile »

For the sake of a story concept I'm toying with, I need tasks that would take one, ten, a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand years to be completed by a single, immortal person working in a sealed off demi-plane that isn't subject to any significant change except that caused by the one immortal worker. Doesn't have to be exactly that number of years, it's fine if one of the projects actually takes like 338 years and 7 months or whatever. The short version of the idea is that when someone enters the plane of this immortal being in self-imposed exile working on what is basically a Minecraft mega-project, they see a couple of his previous projects still lying around, perfectly preserved, most of them things that took just a couple of years long while he was still ramping up the patience for the bigger ones, and then there's the current ten thousand year mega-project he's working on, which is somewhere in the last millennium of construction. Close enough to the end that it's clearly taken shape, but far enough away that he isn't going to be leaving anytime remotely within the scope of the story.

Does anyone have any ideas for tasks that would take that long for a single, monomaniacally dedicated worker one, ten, a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years? Preferably things that fall into the Minecraft millieu of impressive but frivolous - carving a giant skull castle into a mountain and such. Although it'd also be kind of funny to have a gigantic pile of rice with a little sticky note with a number written on it, or a hand-copied transcription of the complete works of Shakespeare, or things like that.
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Post by Shatner »

Chamomile wrote:For the sake of a story concept I'm toying with, I need tasks that would take one, ten, a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand years to be completed by a single, immortal person working in a sealed off demi-plane that isn't subject to any significant change except that caused by the one immortal worker. Doesn't have to be exactly that number of years, it's fine if one of the projects actually takes like 338 years and 7 months or whatever. The short version of the idea is that when someone enters the plane of this immortal being in self-imposed exile working on what is basically a Minecraft mega-project, they see a couple of his previous projects still lying around, perfectly preserved, most of them things that took just a couple of years long while he was still ramping up the patience for the bigger ones, and then there's the current ten thousand year mega-project he's working on, which is somewhere in the last millennium of construction. Close enough to the end that it's clearly taken shape, but far enough away that he isn't going to be leaving anytime remotely within the scope of the story.

Does anyone have any ideas for tasks that would take that long for a single, monomaniacally dedicated worker one, ten, a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years? Preferably things that fall into the Minecraft millieu of impressive but frivolous - carving a giant skull castle into a mountain and such. Although it'd also be kind of funny to have a gigantic pile of rice with a little sticky note with a number written on it, or a hand-copied transcription of the complete works of Shakespeare, or things like that.
I think you ought to draw some inspiration from the movie Wall-E because that's pretty much what we see on display during the Earth segments. It's been 700 years and the project was deemed a failure within the first decade or so. The titular character has been working continuously, erecting skyscrapers of compressed garbage, while everyone else either GTFO'd or broke down.
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Post by erik »

I'm reminded of pouring an ocean out of a bucket.

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In that vein, one could manually bring water up to a plateau and carve a canyon via waterfall. Or dig trenches to redirect water to create a waterfall to carve a canyon. Then the immortal just needs to redig connecting trenches every now and then as they fill with silt, and let the water do the carving work. It gives the immortal something that can be well progressed, but not complete.

Breeding animals to create many new species is another long term project. Maybe only sloths are present so they get bred for multiple different traits. Get sloth mounts, sloth beasts of burden, sloth living furniture, sloth house servants, etc.
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Post by OgreBattle »

An indian guy basically demolished a mountain so the route to get fresh water was easier.

Digging irrigation canals to turn australia green
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Post by tussock »

To move people off fossil-fuelled vehicles you need a few things.

A national (or ideally, continental) system of regulations for changing stations. Regulated plugs and voltages and wattages and so on, at home and in public, systems that allow the car to tell the charging station what it can handle that are 100% reliable no matter where you drive your car to or who makes your car. Automatic payment accounts attached to each car are ideal, and should have a date set for their standard introduction.

Add to that a ramping percentage of parking spaces, public and private, must have a charging station, in each and every parking location.

Add to that a ramping rate of tax on sales of new petrol vehicles, which goes to a targeted fund to refund costs on new battery vehicle purchases, with a fund manager required by statute to try to clear it by predicting sales. Hybrids get a bit of the tax and a bit of a subsidy depending on engine and battery size.

And you need testing standards for all the things they do. Miles per kw-h or whatever, charge cycles until 25% of capacity is lost, whatever they advertise gets a standard test.

And then you want to be a government that taxes fossil fuel electrical generation to subsidise the creation of 24-hour renewable electric generation. This is the easiest part, but also the easiest to buy some politicians to break so you can make bank on your fossil fuel investments instead.

PS: car engines are about 30% efficient, power plants are about 60% with coal or about 90% with oil, and battery cars with regenerative braking are over 100% efficient when you count the regained energy again, so power plants totally win in terms of CO2 even without renewables (not by that much, because transmission losses, but still). Massive solar generation is also extremely cost effective compared to everyone buying their own little solar panels, just basic economics.

You also want big-ass high speed electric trains to replace personal vehicle use for daily commuters and that gets you far cheaper transport than using battery cars again, but you need a government that believes in doing stuff like that.

And when the big ships carrying oil run out of oil to carry, you'll either be finished that, or you won't. Trying to run a modern country on coal again doesn't work, but solar doesn't bootstrap, so either way you're completely fucked.
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Post by erik »

Tussock not only do you say plenty of wrong things, naturally, but what the fuck does it have to do with anything remotely in this thread? All I can figure is that you read "turn Australia green" and utterly failed to understand context or literality of the color.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Adding charging infrastructure is such a big ordeal that I think converting to hydrogen fuel is the way to go. It does take an energy input to separate hydrogen from water, but if that is implemented with a renewable (it's okay to make it only when the wind blows or the sun shines) you can implement it at petrol stations by fiat. If every existing gas station has it available, consumers will have no reason to choose a gasoline engine and manufacturers will be able to produce them.

This would require less change in behavior - you could have 'big trucks' that can handle long distances by having relatively large tanks. The energy value of hydrogen is greater than that of gasoline once it's in the tank (though again, it takes energy to get it there).
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Post by Stahlseele »

Also, no, they are not more than 100% energy efficient.
There is no such thing. There is always loss, even though one can not destroy matter or energy, only change it around a bit.
If they were more than 100% efficient with energy due to regenerative braking, you'd have electric cars that charge themselves more than they use up their charge. Which is, of course, utter nonsense.
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Post by Kaelik »

When Tussock claims that he there is a readily available infinite energy source just chilling in a bunch of people's cars, and that's a minor side not to how wrong his post is....
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Post by tussock »

@erik
Prak wrote:OK, let's say that some US president in the near future got a hair up their arse about peak oil, and wanted to change the country over to electric vehicles.
@stahlseele, Kaelik
When you count the energy efficiency of a petrol vehicle, you count how much energy there is available in the fuel, and how much of that gets output to the drivetrain.

When you put your foot on the brakes and stop, and then start again, you burn more fuel, and that doesn't affect your energy efficiency measure of the engine, because you're putting that out to the drivetrain too, you just add the outputs together. Even though you would have burnt less fuel by not stopping in the middle.


When you count the energy efficiency of an electric vehicle the exact same way, the amount of energy it pulls from the charger, against the amount of energy it outputs into the drivetrain, well, you get to add some of that energy back into the batteries when you put your foot on the brakes.

And then when you start again, you output that recovered energy into the drivetrain again and you add that to the first bit you put out, just like the petrol cars do.

In a measure of energy taken from source vs output to drivetrain, like petrol engines use, like you want to use to compare to a petrol engined car, you do get over 100%.

Because 80% + 30% + 11% + 4% + ... > 100%. The amount of energy supplied to the drivetrain of an electric car is indeed greater than the charge supplied to the battery (in certain classes of city driving, and not in smooth level open road travel).

But thanks for being stupid, it's fun to explain things.
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Post by Hicks »

Ok, firstly, regenerative breaking never increases the efficient use of stored energy above 100%. Why? Because of unwanted heating due to electrical resistance, air friction, and tire/drive train friction, and furthermore "fast charging" batteries is inherently less efficient than "slow charging" batteries for several hours.

Now there is a work around: you could have the regenerative breaking power a flywheel instead of the battery, but that's extra mass you have to lug around which literally has to absorb all the kenetic energy of the vehicle, and has a tendency to explode if/when its bearings fail. AND EVEN SO you still lose energy due to friction from the tires/drivetrain, air resistance, bearings on the flywheel, and waste heat due to electrical resistance inherent in the circuit.

SECONDLY: regenerative breaking is slower than old-fashioned frictional breaking, which means you can't do it in every circumstance and not crash, and in situations where the regenerative breaking is too slow the friction breaks engage and all the vehicle's kinetic energy gets lost as fractional waste heat instead of A PORTION OF IT, NOT ALL OF IT, going back into the battery.

THIRDLY: I get what you were trying to say, but you're still wrong. Gasoline/petrol/diesel is way more energy dense by mass than electrical batteries. This is why oil based vehicles just have a longer range compared to electric vehicles, fuel tank and battery mass being equal, even with regenerative breaking.
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Post by Username17 »

Tussock wrote:Because 80% + 30% + 11% + 4% + ... > 100%. The amount of energy supplied to the drivetrain of an electric car is indeed greater than the charge supplied to the battery (in certain classes of city driving, and not in smooth level open road travel).
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Post by Stahlseele »

Tussock . . Just . .
Where do you think the energy comes from?
If somebody had solved the 100%+ Efficiency problem, we'd be having world peace and world hunger solved because we'd be living in a net + of free energy. Even in a City, you will NOT drive 100m with your electric toy car from red light to red light and from braking recover enough energy to cover the next 100m. It. Does. Not. Work. Simple as that.
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Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Parthenon »

tussock wrote:When you put your foot on the brakes and stop, and then start again, you burn more fuel, and that doesn't affect your energy efficiency measure of the engine, because you're putting that out to the drivetrain too, you just add the outputs together. Even though you would have burnt less fuel by not stopping in the middle.
So... what you're saying is that your measurement system is complete bullshit? Is there a measurement system that makes sense and doesn't try saying that something creates energy out of nothing?
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Post by erik »

tussock wrote: But thanks for being stupid, it's fun to explain things.
It's not just that you are always wrong. It's the fucking arrogance that after you have been demonstrably wrong on everything ever that you are so fucking certain THIS time you are right and other people are stupid. Even when making claims that defy an apparent law of nature you cling to unfounded arrogance. Srsly.
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Post by Kaelik »

erik wrote:
tussock wrote: But thanks for being stupid, it's fun to explain things.
It's not just that you are always wrong. It's the fucking arrogance that after you have been demonstrably wrong on everything ever that you are so fucking certain THIS time you are right and other people are stupid. Even when making claims that defy an apparent law of nature you cling to unfounded arrogance. Srsly.
This, I still remember when Tussock told us he doesn't know anything about Christianity in response to being completely wrong about Christianity, and then made a post like a page later based on his authoritative knowledge of Christianity.
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Post by Prak »

These days, when I see a Tussock post, I just wait for someone (Kaelik) to come along and explain everything that's wrong about it.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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Post by Kaelik »

Prak wrote:These days, when I see a Tussock post, I just wait for someone (Kaelik) to come along and explain everything that's wrong about it.
I usually wait for DSM to do it, because I only can really muster the energy for a through discussion of religion or law these days.
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Post by DSMatticus »

I honestly didn't even read that one. I saw the first sentence and didn't really expect anything interesting to come of it. Then people started responding, and I have to admit I spent a couple minutes trying to replicate tussock's reasoning. There's madness there, certainly, but I feel like if I turn it just the right way it'll make a fucked up kind of sense and I'll understand what the hell he thinks he's saying. But then I started hearing the screams and my eyes began to bleed, so I stopped. Things aren't quite back to normal yet. My girlfriend is still crawling on the ceiling. She woke me last night, telling me I needed six goats and a Tesla to complete the ritual.
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Post by Shrapnel »

^ That may be the funniest thing I've read this year.
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Post by Hicks »

Ok, this post is dedicated to Tussock and people like him.

Dude, I get what you tried to do there: You were comparing emptying a tank of gas against emptying a battery of electric charge, and how regenerative breaking allowed you to use more energy out of a battery than if you were limited to just dissipating your vehicle's kenetic energy as heat for a gasoline powered vehicle. So I looked it up (and by looked it up I just typed "regenerative breaking efficiency" into google) and it turns out regenerative breaking is ~55% efficient at turning a vehicle's kenetic energy back into electric charge for the battery to use, and the remaining 45% of that kinetc energy turns into useless waste heat; under the best of circumstances regenerative breaking is theoretically up to ~70% efficient (with "the proper gearing") but is not currently that good and isn't better than ~55% in current production cars.

All production electric cars use lithium-ion batteries, because those batteries are the most energy dense. Specifically, Li+ batteries hold 1.8 Mj/kg, which is about 3.5x better than the 0.534 Mj/kg in a typical lead/acid battery found in basically every gasoline/diesel vehicle.

So with both of those things in mind let's conduct a thought experiment that is the most advantageous for a regenerative breaking electric vehicle compared to a gasoline vehicle: each vehicle has the same mass in batteries or fuel, we're going to ignore everything that isn't breaking or cruising (so we'll be ignoring all the effects of drivetrain waste friction, road friction, air resistance friction, and all situations where regenerative breaking is too slow to stop the vehicle for a road hazzard) and we'll focus solely on turning all the potential energy stored in the vehicle's battery/tank of one (1) kilogram into kinetic energy, and we'll use the 70% "proper gearing" that dosen't exist on current road vehicles.


(1.8×1)+(1.8×0.7)+(1.8×0.49)+(1.8×0.343)+(1.8×0.2401)+(1.8×0.16807)+(1.8×0.117649)+(1.8×0.0823543)+(1.8×0.05764801)+(1.8×0.040353607)+(1.8×0.028247525)+(1.8×0.019773267)+(1.8×0.013841287)+(1.8×0.009688901)...

So after the electric vehicle compleatly drains its battery, turning all of its stored potential energy into kenetic energy, and then regeneratively breaks back up to 70% of its previous total charge, we've utilized 5.9593066 Mj of energy, but number is rather misleading because the vehicle never ever has more than 1.8 Mj of kinetic energy at one time. Indeed, every iteration reduces the maximum kinetic energy the electric vehicle can achieve by 30% IN THIS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ONLY; remember we took out drive train, air resistance and road friction.

So 5.96, how does this compare to a kilogram of gasoline? It dosen't. Gasoline has 46.4 Mj/kg, so even with regenerative breaking the kilogram of gas goes over 7x the total kinetic output of a kilogram of the best battery in the most favorable thought experiment devised to showcase the usefulness of regenerative breaking. It's worse than you think because the battery powered vehicle is limited to a maximum output of 1.8 Mj, and only ever gets less with each subsequent regenerative charge.

Electric vehicles with regenerative breaks are not a magic bullet against the raw energy density of petroleum; they are a step in the right direction, but won't supplant petroleum until there is a radical technological advance in the field of batteries or some other yet undiscovered method of local electrical storage.
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